


NOBODY LEFT TO FORGET

by cailures



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Amnesia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 20:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15758865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: On the way back from finding the eagle, Esca accidentally drinks from the river Lethe and loses almost all his memories of Marcus. Marcus has to fix it, and not with his dick.





	NOBODY LEFT TO FORGET

**Author's Note:**

> For #8.
> 
> I realize I’m completely torturing the actual mythology to meet the needs of my plot here, but that seems like a very Roman thing to do with other people’s mythology so I have no regrets.

As the flames of the funeral pyre die down, Marcus looks almost concussed, as if he hasn’t quite prepared himself for the sudden lack of emergency. He wraps up the eagle and stores it reverently in his pack, then turns to Esca as if he’s going to say something, but stops on an indrawn breath with his mouth half-open. He breathes out and reaches instead for Esca’s hand, clasping it in both of his own and squeezing. 

“If your father were British,” Esca says, “we would have a feast in his honor. He died well.”

Marcus smiles. “Thank you. Perhaps when we get home – or, well - ” he looks down at their hands, perhaps realizing for the first time that Esca might no longer choose to call Calleva home. 

“You’ll need a guide at least as far as the wall,” Esca says. Marcus nods and the unspoken hangs between them for a moment until one of Guern’s men calls them away to clean up and have something to eat. 

*

They take the trip back slowly. Marcus is healing and they’re both exhausted to the bone, the lethargy and post-adrenaline hangover catching up to them along with a whole train of minor injuries and aches. Esca insists on a full day of rest before they set out, with a proper fire and real food that’s actually been cooked before they eat it. Marcus protests, and then sits down to rest his leg and falls immediately asleep. 

Esca watches him from across the campsite. His eyelashes are dark on his cheeks; his head, thrown back against a tree, exposes his whole bare throat to a quick knife or even a bow. It’s a stark, pale target against the black bark, and if Marcus had been his father and Esca had been his father, there would already be a dagger through it.

Esca takes a deep breath and decides to give up wondering why there isn’t – he knows. He’s not sure exactly when it started, but when he refused to translate the Seal Prince’s slander against Marcus’ father, he knew for a certainty. 

Fatigue is a piss poor excuse for the way Esca finds himself staring at the trusting, undefended skin covering Marcus’ jugular. What would Marcus do if Esca climbed over his legs and started pressing kisses just there, where his throat moves with every breath? Would he push Esca away and make some excuse about his honor, or would he curl his hands around Esca’s hips and ask him what took so long...

Esca shakes his head as if trying to shake off a fly. This is ridiculous. Marcus is devoted to the eagle and Rome. He controls his passions honorably, in the way where he won’t rape a body slave, no matter how obvious the lust was in his eyes back in the arena. But what Esca wants from him, Marcus can’t give. Daydreaming about it is profoundly stupid, and chasing Marcus back to the wall is just putting off the inevitable. And yet...

After the second hour, Esca decides that Marcus clearly isn’t going to wake up any time soon and walks around the fire to spread out a blanket on the ground and arrange one of their packs as a pillow. He carefully grabs hold of Marcus’ shoulders and maneuvers him down onto the ground, trying not to think about how warm and solid he is. Marcus mumbles and shifts around a little, but stays mostly unconscious. 

Marcus sleeps from high noon all through the rest of the day and half of the night. Esca does his best to mend whatever he can, catches a couple squirrels and roasts one to eat with the bread Guern gave them, sharpens all the knives he can find in both of their packs, and tends to his own collection of scrapes and bumps as well as he can without a proper herb collection or even clean bandages. One of his ankles is sore and bruised, possibly strained, but it’s hard to wrap by himself and Marcus needs his sleep. 

Marcus wakes up halfway through the night and blinks around at the torchlit darkness in confusion. Esca smothers a smile. “It’s near midnight,” he says, and passes over a skin of water. 

Marcus drains it. “All right,” he says, “I’ll concede – that was a good idea.” His hair is flattened to his face and his legs still sprawl across the ground, heavy and pliant from sleep. He shakes himself. “You should have woken me up. You need sleep as well.”

“I can sleep now.” Esca says. “There’s plenty of night left. We’ll leave in the morning.” He curls up in his own blankets and falls asleep almost immediately. 

*

The morning is gray and misty, although thankfully not outright raining. Guern’s men have given them two fine horses and with their bags full of bread and their gear repaired, they’re both in relatively good spirits. 

“Now that you’ve restored your family’s honor,” Esca asks, “what will you do?”

Marcus is silent for so long that Esca wonders if he’ll respond at all. “When Roman soldiers retire, they’re granted land by the state. Most of them settle down, raise their families.” He sounds almost miserably unenthusiastic about it, as though he’d rather go back to the Seal People and turn himself in. 

“But not you?”

“I have no wife,” Marcus says. “Nor children. But I won’t be fit for the army again with this leg, and I’ve no skill for politics.” He makes a face so sour Esca has to laugh. “And you? What will you do, now that you’re a free man?” He says it casually, but there’s an undertone of fear in his voice that gives Esca pause. 

“I was under the impression,” Esca says slowly, “that Roman freedmen usually became the clients of their former master.”

Marcus looks sharply at him. “I would not bind you in that way,” he says. “Not you. Not knowing – how your people died.”

He’s truly a free man, not in the Roman sense of being bound with a thousand obligations, but truly. could go anywhere. Somehow, the thought evokes loneliness more than anything, a mental image of himself climbing up a scrubby hill without the familiar uneven rhythm of Marcus’ footsteps behind him. 

“Then I do not know either,” Esca admits.

*

On the third day, they reach the battlefield. The smell is unmistakeable to anyone who’s smelled it before. 

Esca catches wind of it first. “Do you smell that?”

Marcus sniffs the air. “It’s fresh,” he says. Both of them urge their horses closer together, their hands checking and re-checking weapons. 

“If there are any British survivors still here, we’ll already be inside their scouts,” Esca murmurs. His eyes flick from tree to tree. Or perhaps it’s a tiny group of a few badly wounded men who can’t even post a scout line. 

As they approach the outskirts of the scene, they see almost all Roman bodies. There are British clothes, a few suspicious daggers, but either the British have already been very thorough in finding their own dead or there were almost none of them to begin with. The Romans’ red cloaks are ground into the mud and filthy. 

“They fought each other,” Marcus says suddenly. His voice is heavy in the foggy silence. “Look.” He points to a pair of bodies in the ground, locked together in death by someone else’s spear. “A mutiny?” 

“Or an ambush. What were they doing this far north?” Esca asks.

“I doubt there’s anyone left here who could tell us.” 

The whole place is windless and too quiet; the noise of their horses’ feet on the ground makes Esca wince. There’s not a living thing in sight except for the two of them and the birds already pecking at the bodies. His shoulders itch; he expects an arrow through them any moment. 

“We can’t do anything here,” Marcus says, “We should go to the wall and report to the garrison, find out what happened.” 

There’s a shallow stream running directly through the field. Esca peers down into the water – the surface looks ordinary but not, shifting in a way that doesn’t quite reflect the clouds above it, even accounting for the movement of the waves. He expects it to be clogged with bodies and filthy with blood and churned-up mud from the bottom, but it seems untouched. 

Without quite knowing what he’s doing, Esca cups his hands and reaches down for a drink. It’s surprisingly cold, icy and clear in the way only enormous lakes usually are in early spring or late fall. 

Esca looks down at his hands in confusion, water trickling out through his fingers. With the first breath in he startles back. He staggers into a discarded shield, cursing and staring around wildly at the completely unfamiliar woods, the gray skies where a moment before the midsummer sun was hot on his arms. He’s wearing traveling clothes – what happened to his tunic? 

“Esca?”

He knows that voice, but the last time he saw Marcus Flavius Aquila, the man was an invalid, half-crippled and confined to his uncle’s villa. Now he’s staring down at Esca in confusion, holding out a hand to help him scramble back up the riverbank. Esca feels a surge of reflexive hatred and resists the urge to slap it away. 

“Where am I?”

“On the battlefield,” Marcus says, confusion all over his face. 

“The battlefield?”

“The one we just ran into.”

He’s dreaming. He fell asleep or fainted in the sun, or that one horse, took a temper and kicked him in the chest again and he hit his head on the way down. 

“Do you have to also invade my fucking dreams?” he snaps at Marcus. “Can’t you leave me alone at least that long?”

Marcus boggles at him. “I’m not a dream.”

“Is this some trick of the Roman gods? This is how they punish recalcitrant slaves?”

“Esca, I freed you. You’re not my slave.”

It’s not a dream. A dream-Marcus torn from Esca’s head would sulk, or beat him, or try to force him, or surely do some other hateful Roman thing to humiliate him. Esca looks around in horror, smelling the whiffs of decomposing flesh.

“What do you last remember, before you were here?” Marcus sounds scared. Esca didn’t realize Romans could sound like that. 

“I...was grooming the horses, with Brutus and Gaius.”

“At my uncle’s villa, in Calleva?” Esca nods, and Marcus stares, but he doesn’t have time to stare very long because Esca’s made up his mind. If he’s going to be suddenly thrust into the future, or the past, or whatever this is, he’s going to make his break for it. They’re north of the wall – he can tell that just by looking around him – and north of the wall is his best chance for freedom. 

“Esca!”

He hears Marcus come crashing down the bank after him, clumsy and enormous. Esca runs. His body protests – his left ankle is shaky underneath him and he has scratches all up that side of his body, newly-healing skin stretching uncomfortably with his movement. Has Marcus been beating him, after all? There’s a soreness in his legs that speaks to days of hard use and nights of too little sleep. But he keeps running, scrabbling back up the bank and realizing too late that he’s run right back into the battlefield Marcus mentioned. Dead Romans everywhere with mud churned up around them, weapons sticking haphazardly out of the filth and ruin. There’s a dagger at his hip already, but Esca grabs one of the Roman swords, just in case. 

“Esca – Esca, stop.” 

Something in the tone: it’s not the way a master commands a slave. Esca hesitates, half-turning with his attention split between Marcus and the treacherous ground in front of him, and that’s his downfall. He staggers over a helmet overturned in the muck. 

Esca goes down hard, his ankle giving out completely. He crashes down into a dead body, his face smashing into the man’s boot. The taste of dirty leather fills his mouth, mud smearing across his cheeks and teeth. He spits, furiously, and scrambles up again, but the ankle won’t hold underneath him; it throbs and gives out and he collapses gracelessly, flinging his hands out in front of him to break his fall. 

His left hand comes down hard on a breastplate at the wrong angle and pain shatters through his forearm as the wristbone snaps. Esca screams, instinctively grabbing the arm towards himself and tipping off balance face-first into the dead man’s neck. There’s a shard of bone poking through the skin – as he flinches back from the carcass in disgust, the edge of it catches on the dead soldier’s armor and another wave of pain ricochets through his forearm. He screams again at the jolt. 

“Esca!” Marcus’ bulk crashes down next to him. “Esca, gods, stop – you’ll kill yourself. You’re going mad; what are you doing?” One huge arm wraps around Esca’s torso and pins him to Marcus’ chest. 

Esca’s breath comes ragged and pained; he half-curls on the ground, sure that Marcus is about to kill him on the spot for trying to escape. He will die honorably. He will not beg. This is what he wanted in the arena anyway, and now it comes only a few days delayed; the gods have been kind to him after all. He grits his teeth and glares up at Marcus, daring him to draw his sword and finish it off. 

“Esca, what - ” Marcus shakes his head, apparently deciding that now is not the time, and carefully picks up Esca’s mangled wrist with one hand. “I don’t have the skill to heal this,” he says, and Esca’s mouth falls open at the care in his touch. Who is this Marcus? Who was Esca to him? 

He’s clearly not capable of fighting Marcus in this state, even though he recognizes Marcus’ limp as a sign of over-straining his bad leg. Again – apparently this Marcus is as much of an idiot about it as Esca’s own. Still, Esca can’t run and he can’t fight, so he obeys silently when Marcus shifts all their bags onto one horse and mounts the other behind Esca, holding him still with one powerful arm. 

They ride in silence for only a few minutes before Marcus speaks. “I think it was the water,” he says. “I heard tales when I was very young – when too many die at once, and they lie unburied and unmourned, the river Lethe rises up to the surface so they can drink on their way to the underworld. I never thought they were true.”

Esca is dizzy from pain, nauseous and fuzzy-headed, but he needs something else to think about, so he asks. “Lethe?” 

“The river of forgetfulness.” Marcus glances back at him. “Souls drink from it and forget their mortal life.” 

It’s far from the strangest thing he’s learned about Romans, and he’s in no mood to argue about it, so Esca lets it go. “Why did I only forget part of my life, then? I remember fighting in the arena. I remember meeting you. I remember everything before that.”

“Perhaps you only had a little bit.” Marcus shrugs. “We’ll get away from that place and find some fresh water so I can clean the wound. A healer would be best, but I don’t suppose you know of any around here.”

“I don’t even know where we are.”

Marcus smiles. “Of course. I’m clearly too used to you knowing everything and just telling me what to do.” Apparently oblivious to Esca’s stunned silence, he continues, “a few days’ ride north of the wall. We went – you really don’t remember the eagle at all?”

Esca sways back and forth, trying to focus. “The eagle?” But it’s a losing battle – his vision is graying out and he slumps forward into Marcus’ arm around his waist.

*

Esca wakes up in a darkened hut. There are women speaking around him, not in Latin. 

_How is the Roman man?_

_Worried sick. He won’t stop pacing, even though he’s limping so badly._

_Should I call him?_

_And say what? “Roman man, your lover is still sleeping! Come and rearrange his hair some more!”_

Both of them giggle.

Lover? Esca’s brain spins woozily. Not a bed-slave, but a lover? Surely British women would know the difference. And who are they? He tries to stay awake but they’ve given him something for the pain and he drifts back asleep again. 

*

Esca wakes up again to an empty hut. There’s some kind of shrine in the corner, with a miniature arm and a tiny person formed in river clay lying on it. A flame flickers in front of it. He falls unconscious and wakes again to Marcus praying to his own gods, Mithras and some others that Esca can’t keep track of, promising better sacrifices, asking for Esca to be healed. 

He sounds ragged, as if he hasn’t slept. Esca struggles to stay conscious, but he’s losing the words of Marcus’ prayer, only hearing the rise and fall of his voice. 

He finally wakes up fully to the sight of sunlight through the door flap and Marcus sitting against the wall. 

“Marcus.” His voice is raspy and parched.

“Esca!” Marcus hoists himself up, stooping in the cramped hut, and crosses the room to sit by Esca’s mattress. “How do you feel? Do you...remember?”

“Awful,” Esca says truthfully. “Not...not how I got on that battlefield.” He watches Marcus’ face crumple at the news and wonders, again, whom he had become. “How did I get from there to here?”

“You passed out. One of the men of this village heard me and they offered you help in exchange for our horses. Their wise-woman has been taking care of you.” Marcus reaches around his shoulders and holds a bowl to his mouth. “It’s just water. Ordinary water, from an ordinary spring. I tried some myself first.” 

Esca drinks, then discovers he’s ferociously thirsty, reaching up to take the bowl himself only to feel a sharp stab of pain up his forearm. He drops his hand and lets Marcus tip the bowl towards his face until the water is gone. 

“What happened to my arm?” 

Marcus’ mouth twitches. “You broke your wrist, but it was clean and the healer has skill. There’s no infection. She thinks you may even have use of your hand once it’s healed.”

Esca nods. It’s better than he would have hoped. 

“I’m sure you’ll be back to besting me in dagger-fights in no time,” Marcus says, evidently intending to cheer him up, but Esca just frowns: Marcus trusts him to spar with real daggers? Is he joking? 

“Did you dream?” Marcus asks him. “When you were asleep, did you dream of anything?”

“No – or, if I did, I don’t remember. Why?”

“I prayed to Asclepius to heal you,” Marcus says, “our god of medicine. He sends healing in dreams. Patients dream of how the god heals them, and they wake up and find it’s come true.” 

“No,” Esca repeats, “I didn’t dream.” 

*

But Marcus seems to: he tosses and turns in his sleep, mumbling about the eagle and the muses and a river. He sleeps on the ground beside Esca, like a servant sleeping next to his master. Perhaps they are lovers – it would explain the way Marcus keeps looking at him with such unexpected tenderness. Esca watches him in the torch-lit hut and wonders what could have possibly happened.

“I will not dishonor him,” Marcus tells himself, out loud. “I will not.” 

Is he talking about his father? As far as Esca can tell from household gossip, Marcus’ father was already dishonored as far as the Romans were concerned. His uncle? 

“Who won’t you dishonor?”

Marcus’ eyes fly open. “Sorry to wake you. It was only a dream.”

“Now _you’re_ dreaming,” Esca says, and Marcus startles fully awake. 

“The mother of the muses! Mnemosyne!” 

“ _What?_ ” 

Marcus stares at Esca as if he’s looking right through him. “A sacrifice,” he says, “I have to make a sacrifice to Mnemosyne. She wants the eagle.” He sucks in a shaky breath.

“Who’s Mnemosyne?”

Marcus breathes in and out, staring at the floor a foot from Esca’s body. He looks directly at Esca, shock giving way to dread giving way to resolution. “Yes,” he says finally. He’s struggling to his feet, his bad leg wobbling a bit under him, and tearing into one of his bags, finally pulling out a golden statue of an eagle – the same statue the Romans carry with all of their legions. What is Marcus doing with one of them here, without his legion? 

“Can you walk?” he asks. “We need to go to the river.”

“Now?” Esca is beginning to suspect Marcus has gone completely insane. 

“I think so.” Marcus looks back at him. “I dreamed that I threw the eagle into the water and you – well, you were healed. Your memory returned.” His cheeks redden and Esca frowns, but nods along. It will be good to get out of the hut anyway, and if it seems so important to Marcus to throw the eagle in the water, he can go along. 

Esca gets up carefully and finds out that he can manage a respectable limp if he leans on Marcus for support. He holds a torch; Marcus holds him and the eagle. The village is quiet, only the night noises interrupting their breathing. Marcus is half-panting, whether from physical or emotional exertion Esca can’t tell. Marcus’ face is set, his jaw clenched. 

They reach the bank, a low sandy slope that gently gives way to dark, lapping water. The current is slow and the river here is shallow. The torchlight flickers on the tiny wavelets. Esca plants the torch in the sand and Marcus holds out the eagle in one hand, staring at it unreadably. 

“Asclepius and Mnemosyne, I offer this to you and pray that you will be honored by it and heal Esca and return his memory.” His voice rings loud in the night silence, and as he finishes the last words, he casts back his arm and throws the eagle into the water.

Esca expects to see it settle to the bottom, but it sinks down, further than he would have credited, until it’s completely out of sight. Marcus catches his breath and kneels down, scooping up water in his cupped hands. “Drink, Esca.” His hands are shaking with urgency? Apprehension? He nearly spills all the water out before he tips some of it into Esca’s mouth. 

Despite the sand, it’s completely clear, and almost sweet-tasting. Esca barely swallows before he’s stumbling back, memories cascading back into his mind. Staying with Marcus day after day north of the wall, even though all his hatred of Rome was clamoring at him to run for his freedom. Watching Marcus dragged behind the Seal Prince’s chariot and wondering when the vindictive triumph would come as he felt his throat close with guilt. The sudden realization that Marcus had freed him and he would still come back, that he could never do anything else. The surety that Marcus was far too Roman to do anything more than honorably refuse to force him, and then the glittering gold disappearing under the waves, just to bring Esca’s mind back to his body.

“I remember,” he croaks, staring at the middle of the river, where the eagle has vanished into the stream. “Marcus, the eagle! Your father!”

“You, Esca, you’re - ” Marcus’ throat works. “I find I would rather have you than a hundred eagles.”

He’s looking at Esca with a strangely familiar intensity, and Esca suddenly can’t breathe. “You have me,” he whispers. “Tell me, Marcus - ” and then, for lack of any appropriate words, he pushes forward to kiss him. 

For a moment, Marcus doesn’t respond at all, but then Esca feels Marcus’ soft intake of breath against his mouth, feels Marcus lean into the kiss and slide one hand up to cup the back of Esca’s head. He shivers, sensation tingling in his scalp where Marcus’ fingers scrape through the short hairs at the nape of his neck, and leans in closer. 

Marcus’ leg gives out underneath him when he stumbles forward, and he ends up dragging Esca down with him. They stay on their knees in the sand, wrapped around each other, until the torch is nearly burned down. 

They will still hurry back to the wall, Esca knows, to bring a report of the massacre to whatever Roman commander is guarding the nearest post. Marcus will insist, and Esca is happy to oblige. They may even go back to Calleva to see Marcus’ uncle and make their report. But after that…

“What’ll we do now?” He asks, into the soft skin of Marcus’ shoulder. 

He can’t see Marcus’ grin, but he can hear it in his voice. “Whatever you want.”


End file.
